Group of Twenty (G20)

The Group of Twenty (G20) is an intergovernmental forum of 19 countries, the European Union and the African Union, formally established on 26 September 1999 at a G7 finance ministers' meeting, with its inaugural finance ministers' and central bank governors' meeting held in Berlin that December. It was created in response to the debt and currency crises that spread across emerging markets in the late 1990s, beginning with the Mexican peso crisis and continuing through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, on the premise that a crisis-response forum needed the major emerging economies at the table alongside the G7. The 2008 global financial crisis elevated the G20 from a finance ministers' forum to a leaders' summit, with the first heads-of-state meeting held in Washington, D.C. in November 2008. The G20's membership has remained fixed since 1999 with no formal admission criteria, a design its own defenders present as balancing systemic economic weight against geographic and population representation; critics argue the fixed roster is itself a legitimacy problem, since a forum that speaks for the world economy has never opened a seat by formal process to the states most affected by the crises it responds to. Unlike the United Nations, the G20 carries no charter, no universal membership and no voting procedure, and functions by consensus among the governments its own founders chose to invite; United Nations leadership takes part in G20 summits only as an invited party, not as a member.